I posted a “Show HN” link to Hacker News on Saturday about my new product, Easy Data Transform. For some hours, nothing happened. No upvotes, no comments. One of the moderators emailed me suggesting I add my own comment. I did that and it started to get some upvotes and other comments. On Sunday I made it onto the front page of Hacker News and stayed there most of the day. The traffic to my new easydatatransform.com website jumped from negligible to around 300 page views per hour. Cool!
In total I got 4,400 unique page views and the discussion generated some 59 comments (including replies by me). Among the predictable ‘why isn’t a web app?’ and ‘why isn’t it on Linux’ questions, there was some useful feedback. But I was quite surprised how little most visitors engaged beyond that:
Visits to the home page: 3,289
Visits to the download page: 192
Installs of the free beta: 20
Signups to the mailing list: 0
I was also surprised that over 70% of the hits were from mobile devices and tablets. I guess that might partly account for the low download rate (Easy Data Transform is only available on Windows and Mac).
But the session duration histogram tells it’s own story.
0-10 seconds. Ouch.
Successful Software 
I think you got mostly mobile because it was the weekend. A lot of people probably not at home.
What’s more surprising is the amount of Mac vs Windows vs Linux users. HN really is for hackers.
Anyway, good luck with your new software. I enjoy reading your articles about your experiences as an indie developer. I started my own adventure recently and I can’t say I’m doing well, but that was expected, so I keep pushing. Your articles really helped me make the decision to quit my job and pursue the indie path.
I think you are probably right about more people using mobile at the weekend. There were some additional downloads on Monday (when people returned to their desktops?).
Good luck with your project!
Probably the best time is Wednesday for a technical blog post? At least my site receives most traffic on Wednesdays.
Yes, but I think that is also when the most links get posted. I posted a link to this article on Monday and it was pushed of the ‘new’ page by other posts in around 30 minutes.
Hi Andy
Have you considered Product Hunt too? It seems quite popular these days.
Good luck with your new product!
On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 8:32 PM Successful Software wrote:
> Andy Brice posted: “I posted a “Show HN” link to Hacker News on Saturday > about my new product, Easy Data Transform. For some hours, nothing > happened. No upvotes, no comments. One of the moderators emailed me > suggesting I add my own comment. I did that and it started to get s” >
+1 for PH. There’s also Indie Hackers, but not as popular.
Yes. It is on my list. I am incorporating some of the feedback from HN before approaching PH.
Many of those short sessions I would attribute to bots. Though I would say the majority are probably bounces. In writing my own programming blog I have found that bounce rates and short sessions remain high. I believe this is due to the programmer quickly assessing the post and then either staying or immediately onto the next Google result. Any how.. Good work and thank you for sharing.
Awesome blog! I’d like to hook you up with a programmer shirt if you’re interested. Keep up the good work.